Some web publishers use HTTPS security on sensitive parts of their sites, such as login pages or checkout pages where users might type in credit card information, but security researchers say it's safest to just use HTTPS, which is also called Secure Socket Layer or SSL, throughout the site.

A year ago, if your site wasn't using a web security protocol called HTTPS, the only folks likely to complain were hacking program released in October that demonstrated how easy it is to grab users' private data from the public WiFi networks commonly found at coffee shops and bookstores.

Default SNMP passwords that are widely known, said the researcher, while SNMP itself is based on HTTPS, which is vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks.

The network infrastructure is already there, and you can secure the transfer of data with existing protocols, such as HTTP over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), known as HTTPS; File Transfer Protocol over SSL (FTPS); and Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP).